Thoughts On Our $40m Series C Funding And What It Means To Our Customers, Prospects, And Partners

By Expert Author: Skyhighnetworks

I am thrilled to announce our $40M series C round of funding today. It is a significant milestone for the company and stands out for three reasons:

The round was co-led by existing investors, Greylock and Sequoia. Why? The answer is simple: Skyhigh is capitalizing on its first-mover advantage and extending its marketshare and mindshare in an explosive market that it helped define.

The round is reasonably weighty coming on the heels of a $20M series B round that we closed last May. Why? The answer is also simple if you consider that for enterprise-focused companies, Series A is typically used to develop product, Series B to prove product-market fit, and Series C to scale sales and marketing. We have proven product-market fit in an explosive market with unmet needs, and the Skyhigh rocket is ready for a serious injection of fuel.

Salesforce, arguably the 800 lb. gorilla and pioneer of cloud computing, joins Greylock and Sequoia to invest in Skyhigh. Why? Salesforce invests in category-creating companies that grow the cloud economy. Skyhigh’s thought- and market-leadership and proven track record in enabling the secure adoption of cloud services are a perfect fit.

A Massive New Market

So what is this explosive market that Skyhigh helped define? It is to enable enterprises to securely adopt cloud services. Cloud services, whether Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) , Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS Security) are disrupting the industry. They hold a lot of promise in enhanced employee productivity, reduced IT costs, and shortened time to market, but they also raise concerns around the security, compliance, and governance of corporate data.

In order to benefit from the promise of cloud services and meet their security, compliance, and governance requirements, enterprises need to:

Discover their exposure and risk from the use of cloud services, Analyze the use of cloud services to encourage employees to use enterprise-ready cloud services, and simultaneously detect anomalous use that is indicative of insider threat, compromised accounts, or infected machines, and Secure their corporate data stored through policy-driven contextual access control, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and data encryption and tokenization.

And they require a user-centric approach where this is all done consistently from the premise and from off-network mobile devices without any friction to the cloud service provider or to the user (no agent, no download, no VPN, etc.), and in a manner that is respectful of the privacy of the user. Today, Skyhigh is unique in delivering these capabilities.

The Product-Market Fit

What is behind Skyhigh’s claim to product-market fit? Our customers. Skyhigh has helped more than 200 enterprises achieve tangible benefits – high ROI, reduction in risk, and secure cloud adoption. Skyhigh has enterprise-wide production deployments across every vertical industry, some with more than 200,000 employees utilizing all aspects of Skyhigh’s Discover-Analyze-Secure capabilities for secure cloud adoption. Customers with an average of 40,000 employees are seeing quantifiable annualized savings of $2.8M per year on average.

Salesforce Invests in Skyhigh

Let’s delve a little deeper into what Salesforce sees in Skyhigh, and, in fact, why other cloud service providers like ServiceNow, Box, Jive, Google, Microsoft, etc., are choosing to partner with Skyhigh. The over-arching reason: Culture. The guiding principles that underpin our culture and drive how we conduct ourselves every single day are: transparency, humility, integrity, innovation, and a long-term view that the job is not done until every customer becomes an apostle, and a true spirit of partnership where you look out for each other’s interest.

A Big, Heartfelt “Thank You!”

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our customers for allowing us to be your partners in your strategic journey to the cloud. To thank our partners for building truly collaborative, deep, and strategic relationships with us based on trust. To thank our investors – Greylock, Sequoia and Salesforce – for supporting us as we extend our leadership in this explosive market.

This is just the beginning of our journey. We will use the capital to expand sales, including international sales, and double down on product innovation — stay tuned for more from Skyhigh!

Author :
Skyhigh Networks, the Cloud Security Services company, enables companies to embrace Cloud Security Services with appropriate levels of security, compliance, and governance while lowering overall risk and cost. With customers in financial services, healthcare, high technology, media, manufacturing, and legal verticals, the company was a finalist for the RSA Conference 2013 Most Innovative Company award and was recently named a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner, Inc. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Skyhigh Networks is led by an experienced team and is venture-backed by Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. For more information on SaaS Security, visit us at http://www.skyhighnetworks.com/saas-security/ or follow us on Twitter@skyhighnetworks.